I am from a family of activists. My uncle, Len Garrison, was the founder of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London, and I draw daily inspiration from his fight for equality along with his love for literature. Books and stories have always been my escape route from busy London life. As a child I was often found reading – in a corner at home in Battersea, or in the library, on a bus, or the back of a car, drifting into the lives of others for hours on end, with only the act of turning the page occasionally jolting me back into reality.

Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, London was incredible, and totally different to the childhood I am giving my son. We had an enormous amount of freedom in an affordable and creative capital, which is just not possible today. My parents were young but could afford to live in the original “nappy valley” off Northcote Road: grand Victorian villas between Wandsworth and Clapham commons, 10 minutes from glorious Battersea Park, passing the maze of housing estates, crisscrossing the river to visit friends and family and falling in love with the whole place.

But the innocence of my childhood was marred by the reality of adulthood. Inequality of every kind: a racial, gender, social, economic, sexual slur always on someone’s lips as I walked the streets. But as I grew taller and my body gained its shape, I held my head higher with every derogatory comment. Stories were my saviour and I knew whatever was happening to me was worse for someone else, near or far. Reading gave me a huge amount of empathy, but more importantly, it gave me the courage to never feel like a victim.

It was so hard to be the only black woman in my division and for my race to be so defining of my work

At times my prospects didn’t seem particularly promising. My mother and I had a tempestuous relationship and I grew up in the shadow of her struggle as a young mum. Often our differences felt insurmountable and I left home at 16 – I didn’t think it would be for ever, and that she would never talk to me again, but it was, and she didn’t. My saving grace was that I always had my maternal grandmother by my side. She showed me a love, courage and strength that was beyond my mother and without her I wouldn’t be the woman I am today.

For a year, home was with a good friend from school and her family. Next it became a flat in Balham with debutantes in their coming-out season. Later I went to my cousins’ in east London. Eventually, home became hostels in Soho. Then home became the streets. But most of all, home became books and the thing I have been the most committed to until I met my husband.

Finding myself on a houseboat by Vauxhall Pier, I came back to my first love – storytelling – and started selling secondhand books under Waterloo Bridge. The thrill of not knowing what was in my Pandora’s box of books on every shift but finding a way to tell and sell the stories by Maupassant, Nin, Baldwin, Coe, Carver, Bainbridge, Carter and Walker to the tourists at my table was incredibly gratifying. From this, I was given a coveted role in the fiction department at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, where I was asked to run the black literature section. Even though I was aware that the publishing industry mostly failed to tell “my” story, I was 19 by the time I realised our stories – stories by people of colour – didn’t have a place in mainstream publishing, but I was naive enough to think the Silver Moon section, the queer women’s shelves on the fourth floor, meant that at least other voices were represented.

I still felt a sense of celebration for the writers I was discovering, such as Courttia Newland who edited IC3 – an anthology of black British writing published by Penguin – as well as bold independent publishing houses such as X Press founded by Dotun Adebayo (who published Victor Headley’s Yardie), not to mention the first black female publisher, Margaret Busby, who cofounded Allison & Busby in the 1960s. To me, the future looked bright and I believed that there was no question that my rich and extraordinary Jamaican culture and African roots celebrated for storytelling couldn’t be brought to a much larger mainstream audience.

After university, I started working at the London Review Bookshop, a new venture that quickly became renowned as a place beloved by thinkers. Working there for five years felt like doing a PhD in literature, and the fact that most of my colleagues and customers were Oxbridge types didn’t faze me in the slightest. I was there on merit, based on my love and knowledge and experience of literature. I worked hard, read everything, stayed for events and the customers became my extended family. I would remember what their loved ones liked to read and took pride in my recommendations and knowledge. Having met so many people who worked in publishing, I decided to try to get a job in the industry – as a publicist. At the time, the only thing that made me different from the people that I was meeting was that my love of books came from somewhere deep – not from a childhood reading Malory Towers and a godmother who could get me in for work experience, but an obsession with stories and storytelling.

I began to apply for jobs at publishing companies when I was 25, and most of the time I wouldn’t get a response. I recently looked back at those covering letters: I had referenced their books I had loved, I had talked about my bookselling skills and my commitment to readers. Nothing. I wrote to all the major publishers. Nothing. I wondered how it could be that with my skills and experience, I wasn’t even getting in the door. Over time I would meet the women who got those jobs ahead of me, and when I asked how, they cheerfully said they went to Oxbridge or had a parent in the industry, and that I was so lucky to be working in a bookshop as that was their dream. Today I meet so many young people who remind me of myself and my struggle. I tell them to armour themselves with knowledge and the passion will carry through. Times are changing – slowly, but there is progress.

Breaking down the barriers – a new chapter in publishing

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I was saved by the arts communications consultancy FMcM, who offered me a job as a press officer. Suddenly I found myself working with all the publishers who hadn’t responded to my application, and I loved it. The team took me under their wing and trained me, and it was exciting. But I missed being a bookseller. I craved the kind of knowledge you can’t hide behind; the kind where someone asks you a question about a book and you either know the answer or you don’t.

I was turned down for a bank loan to open a bookshop in Hackney. They laughed me out of the branch. I wanted somewhere on Broadway Market, but they said there would never be any reason for people to go there. As a fourth-generation Londoner, I knew my city was going to boom – today there are three bookshops in London Fields.

I started travelling to European cities whose countries still belonged to the Net Book Agreement (which allowed retailers to set the price of their books and had been dissolved in the UK in 1997). Berlin became a clear contender for my new life and my bookshop dream: a lively city with cheap rents, a creative history and a great club scene. Before I knew it, I met a boy (who later became my husband) and persuaded a book wholesaler to do me a special deal on the stock, having been given some money by my boyfriend’s father, who believed in my passion. Within six months I opened my shop – Dialogue Books. It was the first English-language bookshop in the city, and I had read every one of the 2,500 titles we stocked. We opened in the back of the Tea Rooms, run by a Dutch and English couple, and hosted events in the marbled basement. It was a dream.

After a few months we moved the shop, now managed by the indefatigable Nerys Hudson, from Mitte to our own space in Kreuzberg, where the cool kids were, and had a blast hosting monthly salons with A-list authors on their German press tours. My relationship with the British publishing industry changed, and I was no longer begging for a job but turning down authors who wouldn’t match our shop’s readership. Berlin is a small city, and word spread and our community of hungry readers and talented writers grew.

So far, so good, no mention of race. I had broken out of the London bubble and had the space and time to hone my skills and interests while developing business acumen. But when I came back home, suddenly I was called “diverse” and “BAME”, and I realised that while I had moved forward, there were very few people of colour who had progressed in the industry – neither represented on the shelves nor at the table of decision-makers. Over the past three years, I have grown increasingly angry and frustrated that we as people of colour have been othered, pitied, discussed, while not very much has changed. After a year in London, I met Tobi Coventry, a young man with a deep and impressive knowledge of film and television and we decided to start our own company, Dialogue Scouting, and set about gaining new clients and building a business from finding books that could be adapted for TV and film.

Alongside Dialogue Scouting, I was the literary editor for Elle and continued to be proud of my work and increased activism, even if the industry hadn’t caught up. I’d been livid to read in the 2017 “diversity” issue of the Bookseller that fewer than 100 books by British people of colour were published in the UK in 2016. That was when literary agent Julia Kingsford (co-founder of the social enterprise literary agency The Good Literary Agency ) introduced me to the managing director of Little, Brown, Charlie King – who asked me what I thought should be done about it. Knowing that Little, Brown was home to the trailblazing feminist imprint Virago, I suggested they set up an imprint dedicated to addressing the industry imbalance in terms of diversity.

The Good Agency wins major grant to boost diversity in publishing

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He agreed. And after many conversations and much hard work I founded Dialogue Books – named after my bookshop in Berlin – with the sole purpose of publishing inclusive books aimed at the LGBTQI+, disabled, BAME and working-class communities. In Dialogue’s first year I am publishing six titles and currently working towards publication with my first award-winning authors: Lisa Ko’s family drama The Leavers, and Patrick Chamoiseau’s The Old Slave and the Mastiff are both coming this spring.

But during my first six months as a publisher I cried every day, as it was so hard to be the only black woman in my division and for my race to be so defining of my work. I felt ashamed at the continual requests to be on diversity panels and hated the feeling that my presence made people think we had made progress; when I got back from Berlin it had felt like we had gone backwards. The publishing industry has utterly failed to tell the stories of people across society, having told talented, diverse writers for decades that there was no space for them, and expecting a largely white, predominantly middle-class staff to be pardoned for not “being woke enough” because of their “privilege”, which only now seems to embarrass them.

But the book world is changing – having read so many reports on diversity I am armed with the facts: if you don’t have a diverse workforce or product, sooner or later you won’t exist. Books such a Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, Black and British by David Olusoga and Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish) have shown that there is a huge appetite for books that challenge, inspire and inform.

This past week I have watched She’s Gotta Have It, The Brothers Size and Black Panther; I’ve read Diana Evans’s Ordinary People; I am writing this article to a soundtrack of Kendrick Lamar, Ronnie Foster, Al Green and Jorja Smith. I know that a new dawn has broken. There is space and appetite for everyone to be included in the conversation, for everyone’s story to be told, and for the decision-makers to come from every walk of life and look like me.

I am driven by the knowledge that my slave ancestors kept themselves alive through storytelling, and no matter how much we are kept down, our stories will rise.

Five books that changed my life

Matilda by Roald Dahl (1988)Matilda is the ultimate bookworm and, like me, she grew up in a household where she was misunderstood. She was my first heroine as she taught me that it was great to be different and familial love can come from elsewhere.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)I was captivated by his voice from the first page. He is so honest and raw on sexuality, erotica and obsessions. It left an indelible imprint on me and opened doors into the expansiveness of love and an intersectional path.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (1997)This was the first book that helped me to understand science and anthropology and what links us as humans as well as why we are different. I think about this book often.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)Growing up in Britain with Jamaican heritage I have always been a minority. Reading Americanah made me consider what life would be like if I lived in a black country. Reading this made me go to Jamaica for the first time and embrace my natural hair.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)I first read this incredible polemic when I was 13 and have since read all seven volumes. I am in awe of Angelou’s journey from extreme poverty to acclaimed writer. She was the first person to help me to understand racial and sexual discrimination, and taught me that black is beautiful even if the world doesn’t acknowledge it.